


On the Habits of Demons

by frumious_bandersnatch



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Character studies, Introspection, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-25 04:08:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30083244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frumious_bandersnatch/pseuds/frumious_bandersnatch
Summary: Human, sub-human, above it all, pain and torture and godliness in the Pit. What do they do, when they’re alone? When they think that no-one is watching?
Relationships: Alastair & Lilith, Azazel & Lucifer
Comments: 4
Kudos: 6





	1. Hymns to an Absent God

Hell is a maze inside a labyrinth. There are false paths and rooms that don’t exist and the pit is different in the eye of every beholder. It twists and warps like the whisps of smoke that inhabit it.

It hurts. It burns. It freezes colder than anything could possibly be. It’s acid and venom and iron.

And the deeper you go the worse it gets. The closer to the source, to that big empty space, the worse it gets.

Azazel’s body- his real one, his true one, the one under all that borrowed meat he wears, bears the scars of it. Shines with the constant pain, the broken bones and wet, raw skin and cracked horns and blinded eyes, the smoke that feels so much sourer. 

Leaning against the bars, talking, breathing it all in. It looks like a cage to him, from the outside, but Lucifer says, when he manages to speak, that there aren’t any bars for him, and it’s simply a ‘comprehensible image of the incomprehensible’.

Azazel doesn’t understand, he doesn’t need to. Metaphysics was never something that interested him.

Lucifer doesn’t often have the energy or the will to speak back. Seems like it takes a lot of effort.

Azazel doesn’t care if Lucifer talks to him or not. Because he can feel his grace, so close and so far away all at once, and he can feel his presence, and he can close his eyes and imagine that he can feel and see more.

Lucifer needs the comfort, too, he figures. He figures he owes his creator that much, owes it to him to keep it from being an eternity of complete loneliness.

He knows his brothers don’t. Asmodeus, Ramiel, Dagon, they can all care less, they’ve all forgotten, he’s still loyal and he will always be loyal because his father sculpted him into something great and gave him a purpose and he  _ will _ see it through. He  _ will _ make him proud. And he’ll be his general when he’s out of the cage, when Michael is stricken down, when Lucifer can finally have anything he ever wanted, or deserved, everything.

Alastair comes. Lilith comes. All different times, they all like to avoid each other. All for different reasons, and Azazel can guess theirs well enough.

Sometimes he weeps. For what was and could have been, for a light lost and all but snuffed out, for the years that still must come before his purpose is realized, for a punishment unjust and undeserved and too much, too cruel.

He hears Lucifer cry as well, sometimes, and that just makes it worse.

Battle plans and strategy, ideas, blood, his special children, Meg and Tom and all the others, his brothers, where they are, when the time finally arrives, the blossoming boy king; he rambles, he raves, he drives himself mad talking to an absence, drives himself into more fanaticism and devotion and when the last seal falls they’ll all be sorry.

He talks through the bars of the cage, and sometimes, if he’s lucky, Lucifer talks back.

And he makes it so that that’s all he needs. That the words like song and music and destruction, so far away, so close, are all he needs to make his smoke resonate, to draw carved back lips into a smile, for his blinded and still seeing eyes to close and imagine and love and yearn, father for son, creation for creator, always and forever and loyal, loyal, loyal.


	2. Wipe it Clean (Flood the Earth)

He cleans. And polishes, and scrubs, and bleaches, and oils, all slowly and surely and by hand. The fruits of his labor, gleaming and glistening and pure. Never a touch of demonic energy, never a spark of magic, not on his rack, not on his tools.

He wipes them clean by hand because he takes pride in it. Because he needs to do something else with his hands. Because sometimes the brushes and the medium are more important than the art; you don’t make a masterpiece with crayons.

It’s never quite perfect. Never quite sterilized. Just as perfect as he can make it with elbow grease and dedication, and if that means shoveling looped intestines into a bucket and scrubbing the grooves in the stone floor with a toothbrush, so be it.

His work is everything and everything is his work. The souls on the rack and the pickup afterwards, a completed cycle. He needs a sense of completion and yes, yes, there are days where he’ll tear through a multitude with no breaks in between and yes, yes, the gore piles up and the blood stains him all over, like a deluge, like a baptism, like communion.

But always, always, after, he cleans. 

And there are breaks. Where he will go deeper into Hell, where he will seek solace, where he will get as close to sleep as he can get. Not very close at all.

But better to lay in bed with one’s eyes closed than to work when the grief and aching piles up, up, too high to function, he can’t very well clean his own tarnished soul, it’s ~~dirty so dirty~~ perfect, made perfect, a sculpture, His sculpture and ~~Samael~~ Lucifer’s pride, white eyes and white marble never spattered with blood for very long. Pristine. A chapel. Cleanliness is next to godliness, after all, and he never spares the rod—

It makes him feel sane. Makes him feel human. Wipes away the blood and the stain, it’s like a confessional.

There are things that he must do that he doesn’t like. Souls given to him that he doesn’t want. He punishes the wicked. He punishes the undeserving, yes, even the martyrs go to hell, even those that do evil for the purposes of good, the ends justify the means, a soul for a life, they all go down…

He’s fine with that. He enjoys the terror. Enjoys it, revels in it, so much blood that needs mopping,

But souls slated for hell, given to hell, given to heaven, split up, the lion’s share torn and rent and fractured, 

Subjective. Is abortion murder? Is drug use, if it doesn’t hurt anybody? What if one’s mother dies in childbirth- would they be the agent of her death? Are they murderers?

Law is subjective. God’s laws are subjective, clad in rusted iron, and there’s no appeal process, not really, a soul given to Hell stays in Hell and round and round it goes until it tarnishes, dirty and pristine and perfect and wrong enough to become a demon…

He doesn’t like the ambiguous cases. More tarnish to his soul, his smoke, that he can’t scrub clean.

He weeps, and he laughs, alone, and secret, and the marble facade cracks and it was never clean because inside it’s blood and tarnish and rot, spilling out until he can repair it and scrub it clean, scour it with steel wool, again.

Alastair is meticulous. Clean and punctual and normal and right and perfect, humanized and animalistic, a walking contradiction so old he can’t fathom it.


End file.
